Assembly

Hey all,
So I was going to post here about a violin I 3D printed and built, and then realised that this is a community waiting to happen. So I created a discourse forum called violinmakers.org. A place for people to share knowledge on how to build electric violin cellos and anything in between.

Electric violins today are usually heavier than their acoustic counterparts, 3D printing and carbon fibre makes it possible to print lighter violins with complex parts. Instead of spending a lot of time carving them in to heavy wood. The need is growing since nearly all music today is amplified.

The challenge is, that while modern instruments have been developing effects and new sounds, acoustic violins have been acoustic for the past 400 years. The years perfected acoustic violins, but this specialisation does not fully translate to electric violins, furthermore it makes it hard to top the rich sound of an acoustic. After all it takes more than a decade of practice to become an “ok” violin luthier.

Recently we achieved the ability to rapid prototype, plus we can learn from other instruments, such as electric guitars. Which have been creating amazing sound modelling techniques. With them I hope we can create new instruments. This is why I created the community.
There is already quite a long list of designs out there, shared in thingiverse mostly, but with little documentation on how to build them, and there is a lack of tests with pickups.

Pickups are am issue

Today, all available violins in the market use a piezo based pickup, this is because piezo pickups sense sound, they are mechanical. They were naturally chosen because they deliver a more acoustic sound, called electro-acoustic. Electric guitars use magnetic pickups, which have a more clear signal from the strings, but loose the acoustic sounds, which is compensated with amps and pedals. I have been playing with those too on violins, it might work. I know it was tested and abandoned around early 2000’s, but things have changed since. There are many more ways to experiment.

I hope that this forum will grow to be a larger community. At the moment I am the only one posting stuff, but I can already see traffic.

A realtime system means its deterministic, it means you should know how long things take to run. They way to do is is to apply a patch to the linux kernel that makes it non-preemptible. To explain – Preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting a task being carried out by a computer system, without requiring its cooperation, and with the intention of resuming the task later.

This is useful for building hardware and robotics, low latency audio and other gpio because there are no surprises when it comes to timing. It seems like something good to try out with the RaspberryPi, because of the GPIO and IOT capabilities.

Bundled with CustomPiOS you can build your customized realtime-kernel device.

Features

Both armv6 and arm v7 are supported! Aka all versions of RaspberryPi to date!

4.9.52-rt37-v7 with PREEMPT kernel

Easy way to set up the network using realtimepi_wpa_supplicant.txt in the boot partition

So do you have a RaspberryPi not doing anything at home? Got that 2GB class 4 SD card that you just don’t know what to do with it? Well this guide is for you! It will let you turn your Pi in to an IOT alarm clock, no code, no complicated commands, just flash, edit two text files and you are good to go. The alarm clock is controlled from Telegram, so you can set it and turn it off from your smartphone. I find that usually using my phone wakes me up. So it’s useful for me. You can also edit the alarm and use any mp3 file you want.
The code is all available in github. AlarmBot is the Telegram Bot. An AlarmPi is the distro (built with CustomPiOS yet again). (more…)

Hey all,
So its been a while since I had time to release something fun. After developing CustomPiOS I thought I might write something to demonstrate how easy it is to make your own RaspberryPi distribution with it. So I made one that runs Electric Sheep on boot. Its called ElectricSheepPi.
Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork that keeps evolving as you vote for “sheep”. So it makes nice visuals and is great to play on a spare screen and Pi. Raspberrypi 2 works, Raspberrypi 3 is recommended for smooth visuals. You can see examples of the visuals on youtube.

To run it

set up wifi, set your wifi settings with the file electricsheep-network.txt or electricsheep-wpa-supplicant.txt.

Plug to HDMI display, internet and boot

Its easy to write a custom distro with CustomPiOS!

To write I had to write a module for CustomPiOS, it was just 32 lines mostly copied from the electric sheep install manual. To make stuff start on boot I used the gui module which lets you start any gui application full screen at boot, that’s 2 lines in the config file.

Today I am announcing a RaspberryPi operating system that addresses a small need we have – Get the RaspberryPi to display a webpage on full screen with no hassle.
The OS is called FullPageOS. And you can download it here.

Why I built it

A friend of mine, Tailor Vijay wanted something to stream video and add titles to it. Also I was looking for a way to start the RaspberryPi with a browser on full screen for a stats screen at work, and apparently the only thing available is complex guides that only partly work on today’s RaspberryPi.

So what I did last weekend is build a distro based off the code of OctoPi, the 3D printer operating system I built. All this distro does is start Chromium at boot on full screen, with a URL of your choice. The url can be changed conveniently from a text file on the /boot FAT folder. So all you have to do is set the wifi and url via text files, boot, and voilà!
Among the minor tweaking is the elusive setting of disabling the screen from blanking.

How to set it up

What’s nice about FullPageOS is that its simple, no need to install packages, just flash it like any distro, set your wifi and URL settings and boot.

Open the FAT filesystem that is mounted as /boot
on the pi

Set the URL you want in the file fullpageos.txt

If you need to set up wifi, set your wifi settings with the file fullpageos-network.txt or any way you want are used to on the RaspberryPI

It’s my 29th birthday this week, and that sorta made me realise no one really knows what I have been doing the past 18 months, so I thought it’s time to tell you how I founded a company. Unlike the tutorials and guides I wrote here, I am not sure this would work for everyone, but it did work for me.

The Idea

I have started one of my biggest and ambitious projects yet, after collaborating with people around the world bringing OctoPi to the world, I realised that something was missing from the scene of 3D design – a decent version control and collaboration tools.

This was the initial idea, as you will see things played out differently, but what was important with this idea was contagious, I got the feeling everyone I told about it wanted to join me, it was wonderful.

Assembling the team

My talent is mostly in the core backed stuff, so I found myself going to one of the more talented web developers I know for help, my co-worker at Zend, Amit. It started by asking him javascript questions. When he realized what I was doing, he started helping me out, and he was fast, suddenly in days my core stuff was accessible to the world with a simple and elegant interface. At that time we thought this is going to be a nice open source project, not something commercial, but as the server load grew on Amit’s little server we understood we needed some way to pay its bills, so I started to look for someone that would help me figure out how to sustain this financially. Since our idea was “github for 3D printing”, it seemed like there should be a way to support it, perhaps charge for closed-source projects.

I’ve been going around the Makerspaces in Tel-Aviv, mostly XLN and T.A.M.I, in some random workshop I came across someone who said “You should write an executive summary, I don’t mind helping you out”. I didn’t even know what an executive summary was at the time, and today it makes me realise how much I learned about fundraising during this year. I later found his name was Ari and he was between companies. We set to meet at Google Campus and write it since we both went to some ecology hackathon that was going on there.

We ended up drunk from exhaustion and pizza, scooting on chairs at the space and we also had a draft. As we wrote it, the idea spread to Ari, and he realized he that he wanted to join. I introduced him to Amit. It took a while to put our trust in Ari, less time than we expected, and today I know ShapeDo would not have reached anything without Ari’s help. Eventually we wrote a few basic agreements on paper and Ari made sure we register a company, ShapeDo was born.

The Pivot

We worked on a new site for 3D printing and launched, we got coverage on 3D printing industry, and the user base grew, but people were not really using the collaboration features. It turns out most people 3D printing share are simple one person designs in one afternoon projects. However, what is special about the 3D printing industry is that there is no 3D CAD tool that was built for it. So you end up meeting designers from mechanical engineering, gamers, architects, programmers and any discipline that has a 3D design program that can export the printable files. We (everything eventually becomes “we”) found that everyone wanted this kind of tool in their workplace, while in 3D printing was not as urgently needed.(more…)

I will note it was pretty nice get in to this release PiCam support, since I have no camera it required collaboration of both Gina and me, meaning we have a distro now that probably can cope with more hardware than you would have in your average personal configuration.

Also thanks Matvin for the storage, and we also have another mirror lined up in case of a overload, which happened last time.

Update: Dropbox have suspended my Public links due to “extreme traffic activity” so in a few hours I should be syncing the image to other mirrors. Other hosting would be appreciated!

Hey all,

I am happy to say that I am a backer of the Rigidbot 3D printer, (which you can pre-order already), I am expecting it to arrive in August. In the meantime, I have ordered a Raspberry Pi to play with and started visiting a local maker community known as XLN.

This led me to find a really cool project called OctoPrint, which lets you control 3D printers using a Raspberry Pi over a web interface, however people were not installing it on their Pis because there was no out-of-the-box solution. Today I am happy to announce that a solution is here! I give you Octoprint + Rapberry Pi = OctoPi. A raspberry Pi distribution which runs OctoPrint out of the box, with support for time-lapse video on webcams (there is also an experiential version in the works that supports streaming from a raspberry Pi camera).

A computer that is running virtual box and virtualbox-fuse – I will show how to do this in Linux, but windows and Mac can do this too.

A copy of AndoVM – This is the reason we can do this, since android by default does not come with an Ethernet drivers and AndroVM is compiled and distributed to run on virtualbox out of the box (pun intended).